


Sizing Up

by PunkHazard



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Raceswap, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 05:11:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1592810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkHazard/pseuds/PunkHazard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hercules Hansen left some awfully big and clunky boots for his daughter to fill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sizing Up

Hercules Hansen left some awfully big and clunky boots for his daughter to fill, but Mum spends more time poring over blueprints and paperwork with the Marshal than she does in the simulator with her co-pilot. Doesn't help that her twelve years in the ADF (which have by now become twelve years in the ADF and ten in the PPDC) kept her far and away from the 'parenting' bit of her job description. 

Dad and Striker and Max are the only things they really have in common. Mum was twenty when she was naturalized in Sydney, fifteen when she arrived and she holds that over Charlie's head sometimes. Not that she means to, just the occasional-- _I wish you'd learned Chinese properly,_ or _You know, if we'd raised you in Hong Kong, you wouldn't have so much trouble with your tones but your father,_ when they do talk, rare as those moments are. 

(Her father, actually, she _doesn't_ know or remember quite as well as she'd like, the memories of him fuzzy and lit in the gaussian-blurred warmth of childhood. That's one of the few things Charlie likes about drifting with Mum; confirming that he really was a good, kind man.)

Other times, it's _You were ten minutes slower against Kaiceph than before; what's happening?_ (never mind Charlie's name in all three slots at the top of Kaiceph's scorechart, forget that) which only leads to _Why are you comparing yourself to other pilots? It doesn't matter how well you do compared to them, you should always be improving yourself._

Which would _maybe_ be a lot easier for Charlie to swallow if Angela didn't insist, every time, that she could be learning a lot from the Wei boys; they're only five years older and look how much better their English is than your Chinese; look at Mako, she's your age and she's already heading up the Jaeger Restoration Program; look at how hard they work, we were just talking the other day about Striker's fluid synapse system and did you know the engineers who worked on Crimson Typhoon helped design it?

And well, Crimson Typhoon's got six kaiju under its belt barring the drops where it was an assist, Mako none at all, and Charlie has nine kills to her name, so maybe they should spend some more time in a Conn-Pod and less with their noses in a book.

There's a reason she stopped talking to Mako after Jaeger Academy.

(This comment doesn't, as ever, go over well with Mum. Still, as long as Charlie's record stays clean and her sim scores stay above the figurative waterline, no one bothers her. More time to tweak Striker's specs, if anything.)

* * *

Charlie doesn't say it out of arrogance or dislike for the earlier generations of Jaeger pilots; but she knows that if the Lieutenants Kaidanovsky can hold the line in their old rustbucket, then any Jaeger after the first generation of cancer machines should damn well be able to hang in there. The only other reason a Jaeger could fall is carelessness.

And, well. The media loves her. 

"They decommissioned the Jaeger program because of mediocre pilots," Charlie says when a reporter shoves the mic under her nose, her eyes landing on the fat lens of a camera pointed directly at her face, "simple as that. That's Striker Eureka's tenth kill to date; it's a new record." Mum's eyes flash over to her, expression severe even though she probably only heard a few words of that interview, the Chinese news outlets all over her scrambling for a comment. 

Parental omniscience or drift hangover; doesn't matter, Charlie knows she'll get an earful later.

* * *

The perks of being a prodigal-- maybe it's prodigious? Well, prodigal works too, but the perks of being an extraordinarily gifted rookie alongside yet another young and excellent pilot candidate who grew up under shockingly similar circumstances means Charlie Hansen has been following Mako Mori's progress since the day she heard someone say 'Tokyo's Daughter'. 

Mako's not even _from_ Tokyo. Even at ten, Charlie knew the difference between Tokyo and Tanegashima (the first hint to this being that the names of the cities are completely fucking different) and that's when she stopped trusting newspapers.

The day the Marshal asks Sergeant Angela Hansen to be his second in command with the PPDC is also the day Charlie gets into her first of many, many fights with Mako. _Maybe_ Charlie was out of line, or _maybe_ Mako could've been more bloody careful and not knocked dad's old tags off the table and _maybe_ Charlie didn't hear her apology because it'd only been a week since the realization first hit her that she'll never see her father again and she'd been crying too loud. 

And Mako's a lot scrappier than she looks, so Charlie doesn't know why Mum made such a big deal of it anyway.

Mako sent her a message on Facebook much later that month with a metaphorical olive branch when she was in Hong Kong with the Marshal. Charlie still has the years of conversation between them, sometimes stopped for months at a time, stored on FB's servers. She pulls them up once in a while to laugh about how dumb they were as kids-- _duh_ , the Mark IIIs would use quantum processors, why in the world would they think that the graphene chips would last for more than two generations?

She doesn't resent the Marshal for many things, but it wasn't _Charlie_ who'd stopped messaging Mako after one of them got assigned to Striker Eureka right after graduation and the other got shunted into Jaegertech. _Maybe_ Charlie would really have liked another girl pilot her age to talk to about drifting and strategy with.

 _Maybe_ Charlie doesn't care how nice the Chinese pilots are, all of them speaking English the same as her mum, the same accent creeping in on their consonants, from almost imperceptible to nearly unintelligible. She's Australian.

... and maybe when Mako bollocksed her first go in a Jaeger, Charlie was definitely out of line for calling her a bitch, but Mako is no slouch herself, because she backed Raaaahleigh up with a hand to his shoulder and slugged Charlie right on the ear. 

Her fucking _ear_?!

* * *

_Why aren't you a better person?_

That stings.

Maybe she'd give more of a shit about saving face for the PPDC if anyone'd taken the time to teach her the ins and outs of saving face. Maybe if Mum cares so much about her conduct as an adult she would've been around more when Charlie was a kid. Maybe if Mum'd bothered to be a mother--

Angela's giving a very good impression of having been slapped across her face. 

Charlie nearly bites the tip of her tongue off in her haste to stop talking, but she can't take words back, only herself out of the situation. She turns on her heels, snaps her fingers and calls for Max as soon as she's rounded the corner.

* * *

She's not looking forward to their next Drift. Still, when Angela straps in next to her and the Drift initiates, Mum's disappointment rings loud and clear. So does the grief, and the guilt and hurt, the depths of which have always been, to Charlie, scary as hell. Fuck having kids, honestly, who'd set themselves up to love anything that'll only return _this much_ pain?

Charlie pushes back against it, resolutely not looking at her co-pilot. 

It's not until they're in hangover mode with the flash guns, the two of them standing on Striker's shoulder, Mum's arm hanging at her side but (sergeant that she is) screaming into the storm, that Charlie lets her neural barriers slip.

 _Maybe_ she sat in bed with Max in her lap and yelled into his droopy bulldog neck that she didn't mean it. _Maybe_ she's an emotionally constipated douchebag who stopped halfway to saying _I missed you so much_ and swerved to the single worst thing that could possibly have come out of her mouth instead because she doesn't know how Mum would've reacted to the former but she's got plenty of experience with the latter. 

When Mako and Raleigh drop, Mum puts a hand on Charlie's shoulder and both of them are very, very briefly grateful for the rain.

* * *

The Marshal is far better at keeping his thoughts quiet than Charlie is. Still, when she involuntarily bombards him with a mess of Mum's memories in the split second before their bomb goes off--

(Angela watching Herc tuck their daughter in when she gets home late at night, standing with the door ajar not wanting to wake Charlie up but desperate to see her face; Angela reading the sim reports labeled Charlie Hansen and brazenly signed Chuckie H., petrified fear that her daughter would be fighting monsters warring against the excitement that they would be fighting together; Angela sneaking her own rations into Charlie's and telling her that she'd eaten half of hers already.)

\-- Stacker offers only one thing in return.

_She's so smart and strong and I've been in her head, she's so kind, Stacker. Look at her. Is it even possible to be as proud as I am?_

**Author's Note:**

> Someone suggested team Striker as a Chinese mother/daughter team and...


End file.
